I agree with your approach to solving disagreements about integrals. I do not see how it applies to politics, where disagreements are far more diverse, including factual, moral, and unconscious conflicts.
Well, people do differ in values, but it seems like more often some people are just wrong. Viz: global warming as a factual disagreement.
So what do you do if half the population disagrees with you about a factual issue? (Copy and paste time!) I don’t say ‘well, if we have the same information, I must have a 50% chance of being wrong.’ Instead, I check the result using boring, ordinary scholarship, and go ‘nope, looks like there’s a mechanism for CO2 to cause the atmosphere to warm up.’
Note that a key part of this process is that if you’re wrong, you should notice sometimes—there’s no “checking” otherwise, just pretend-checking. So that’s a good skill to work on.
That some people are “just wrong” is not at issue. Even mistaken people agree that some people are wrong. (They just think it’s the right-thinking folks who are in error.)
I don’t say ‘well, if we have the same information, I must have a 50% chance of being wrong.’
Of course you don’t. If half the population disagrees with you about an issue, you should interpret that as evidence that you are incorrect. How strong the evidence is, depends on how likely they are to possess information you don’t, to be misled by things you’ve prepared yourself for, etc.
I agree with your approach to solving disagreements about integrals. I do not see how it applies to politics, where disagreements are far more diverse, including factual, moral, and unconscious conflicts.
Well, people do differ in values, but it seems like more often some people are just wrong. Viz: global warming as a factual disagreement.
So what do you do if half the population disagrees with you about a factual issue? (Copy and paste time!) I don’t say ‘well, if we have the same information, I must have a 50% chance of being wrong.’ Instead, I check the result using boring, ordinary scholarship, and go ‘nope, looks like there’s a mechanism for CO2 to cause the atmosphere to warm up.’
Note that a key part of this process is that if you’re wrong, you should notice sometimes—there’s no “checking” otherwise, just pretend-checking. So that’s a good skill to work on.
That some people are “just wrong” is not at issue. Even mistaken people agree that some people are wrong. (They just think it’s the right-thinking folks who are in error.)
Of course you don’t. If half the population disagrees with you about an issue, you should interpret that as evidence that you are incorrect. How strong the evidence is, depends on how likely they are to possess information you don’t, to be misled by things you’ve prepared yourself for, etc.
Agreed. I guess what makes checking the math work in the integral case is just that the better you are at checking the arguments, the less you have to worry about what other people think.